


Rendezvous

by Elsinore_and_Inverness



Category: Doctor Who, Richard II - Shakespeare
Genre: (not really colliding), Attempted Murder, Crossover, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Hospitals, M/M, Multiple Universes Colliding, New York City, Pete's World, Pontefract Castle, Surgery, Time Travel Fix-It, attempted regicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-24
Updated: 2017-09-24
Packaged: 2019-01-05 01:23:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 8,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12180159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsinore_and_Inverness/pseuds/Elsinore_and_Inverness
Summary: TenToo ensures the creation of the split in spacetime that will lead to Pete's World... By rescuing King Richard II from Pomfret Castle





	1. Chapter 1

A tall thin man, quickly followed by a blonde woman emerged from the blue phone box.  
The door of the house that the garden surrounded clattered open, revealing a little girl with brown hair unevenly plaited down either side of her head.

'Mum! Dad!' she cried, running towards them. 

'Did you finish your homework, Rosalind?' The Doctor asked.

'I only started school a few months ago, dad. They don't give us homework yet.'

'They don't give six-year-olds homework?' he wondered.

'Can you imagine if they did? What is two plus two? What letter comes before what? When was the introduction of decimal currency?'

'Those are all very important factors in understanding which star system you reside in, young lady.'

'But I KNOW what star system I live in! I've never LEFT Monmatia in my entire life.'

'We're working on it.' her mother promised.

'Wait... Monmatia? Have you been reading the Urantians again?' 

'No...' Rosalind muttered guiltily.

'What did I tell you about religion?'

'That it's dangerous?'

'You're allowed to believe whatever you want, as long as you remember that this world is one of billions and many worlds have hundreds of religions, and what you believe will never necessarily be the most correct-' her mother counseled.

'It's all rubbish made up by undeveloped civilizations to explain phenomena they don't understand-' the Doctor interrupted.  
Rose shot him a strange look.

'Sorry, sorry- What she said-' he amended. 'What about those Torchwood files you were supposed to go through?'

'I got a hold of them, if that's what you mean.' Rosalind shrugged. 'Why don't you know how to hack? You've been on this planet my entire life-'

'I know how to hack!' the Doctor protested indignantly, 'It's just... Not everything was... Retained.' 

Rose put her hand on his arm, 'Of course you do, love.'

He shivered. Even his memory seemed to be human these days. It felt claustrophobic. Nine hundred years crammed into a filing cabinet too small to hold them. 

Just then a familiar sound filled the air, and the flowers on the bushes danced in the centripetal breeze that now stirred the atmosphere. The Doctor started in surprise, senses on alert. Rose spun around to face a second TARDIS, this one was of a brighter blue, with frosted windows in the shape of a 'T.'

'St. John's Ambulance?' the Doctor read off the right-hand door, 'Are we doing that again?'

A grey-haired man and a young woman stepped out of the other TARDIS. 

'TenToo! Rose! I need to speak to you!' the man announced as 

'TenToo? Who's that?' the Doctor frowned, his Estuary English accent taking a stronger foothold as though warding off an odd desire to imitate the Scottish accent of his future self. 

'You are, that's what they call you.'

'What who calls me?'

'Never mind that.'

'Doctor.' Rose pronounced, pain in her voice.

'Oh, Rose.' 

Rose ran to the older Doctor and hugged him. 

'The hugging. That's a thing.'

'Who's the new assistant?' She asked. 

'Bill.' Bill waved awkwardly.

'You've regenerated.' Rose pointed out. 'That must mean that-'

'Twice.' The older Doctor agreed.

Rose looked over her shoulder at her husband, who was still shivering. She reached out her hand to him and gave his fingers a squeeze of reassurance. 

'Is that what you looked like?' Bill asked. 'He looks kind of afraid. What's wrong with him?'

TenToo gazed into the middle distance, his dark eyes open alarmingly wide. 'Gallifrey's back.' he whispered. 'And the Blinovitch Limitation Effect... I don't understand, it's not quite recognizing me as the same person, so the TARDIS can't cancel it out properly-' 

'It's a rather unique occurrence, possibly absolutely unique...' the Doctor paused, regarding the duplicate of his former self. 'Go inside and get warm. Your body temperature regulation is clearly malfunctioning.'

TenToo nodded. 'Yes, sir.'

'Don't- don't call me sir.' 

TenToo bowed his head in assent.

The wooden door clattered shut behind him as his daughter followed him inside.

'So what happened?' Rose inquired.

'Well, I got married twice.'

Rose swatted him with her hand.

'Forced into it both times. Fate of the universe at all.'

'Humans?'

'One was human. The other was genetically modified to be part Time Lord.'

'How long has it been?' Rose asked, softly.

'Biologically, around a thousand years. Chronologically, nearer five billion.'

'You don't mean time travel?'

'There was a causality loop. This body only lived through a few days of it, so I don't remember it... Maybe bits and pieces, because, you know-'

'Time Lord.' Rose supplied.

'Exactly.'

'Is- Is that little girl-'

'Your daughter, yes. Rosalind. One quarter Time Lord, three quarters human.'

'Tell-' the Doctor began.

'Tell me everything.' Rose completed.

Bill looked around awkwardly. 'I'm, just going to go-' 

The door clattered again.

'Should really get that fixed.' Bill muttered to herself.

She found TenToo and Rosalind in the kitchen. He appeared to be wearing multiple jumpers, one over the other, and was standing over the stove waiting for the kettle to boil.

'Tea?' He asked without turning around.

'Yes, please.' She sat down across from Rosalind, who was staring at her with a disconcerting intelligence.

'You've been to other star systems, haven't you?' Rosalind said, it wasn't so much a question as a statement of fact.

Bill nodded. 

TenToo carried the kettle over to the table and poured each of them a cup of tea.

Bill tried not to squint at the garishly coloured knit that clothed his slim form.

'Feeling better?' 

'A bit. The Limitation Effect is proportional to physical proximity.' 

'The Doctor said he came here to visit a friend, I didn't realize she had a previous version of himself.'

'I feel-' he was speaking nearly inaudibly, 'I feel like I should be happy. Gallifrey wasn't destroyed. A weight that has hung over me for so long- But-' He stared at the table. 'The guilt's still there. The pain. All of it. IT'S STILL THERE.' His voice suddenly raised to a shout.   
Bill reached across the table and slid his teacup closer to him. He picked it up and sipped from it. 'Sorry.'  
'Don't apologize.' She gazed levelly at the Meta-Crisis Doctor. He was on a slow road. Living closer than he ever had to the ephemerality of life. Watching the flowers die and scatter seeds, rather than the rise and fall of civilizations.  
'So- those Torchwood files-' Rosalind interjected.

'Yes, yes, of course.' He turned his attention to his daughter.

'What did you find?' Bill asked. 

'Some recordings of disturbances... At the turn of the fifteenth century. They- As you know- have been trying to pin down when this universe diverged from our universe. That is to say- your universe.' She nodded at Bill. 'You'd think it would be simple enough, just go through the history books, see when things start being different, but there's a considerable amount of uncertainty once you go that far back- It's not that there's not stuff, there's lots of stuff, but not quite as much as there is in our- your- world, because you see...'  
The door clattered open again and the Doctor and Rose entered the kitchen. 

'The TARDIS is picking up instabilities in the-' the Doctor paused and looked around the kitchen. 

'How long have you been here?' he asked. 

'Seven years.' TenToo admitted, 'We should be able to get our homegrown TARDIS to go interstellar by the end of the week.'

'You've been stuck in this star system for twenty-seven years?'

'Seven years.'

'Where were the instabilities?' Rosalind inquired seriously. 

'Tail end of the 14th century.' The Doctor smiled.

'We can investigate in our TARDIS.' TenToo offered.

'Oh, what do you know, you've been stuck here for twenty-seven years.'

'Seven.'

'Looks like it.'

'You're so mean to me.'


	2. The King's Blood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So um... There's blood and stuff. The Doctor finds Richard almost dying.

Richard, breathing hard, staggered backward still clutching the knife he had used to stab the two would-be murderers now lying at his feet. 

'Go thou, fill another room in hell!' he cried. There was blood on his hands. On the knife. Streaming down, mingling with his own blood from where the chains had cut into his wrists. 

He thought he heard footsteps behind him. Then he felt a sudden stab of pain in his back and gasped, 'That hand shall burn in never-quenching fire that staggers thus my person!' He sank to his knees, darkness seeping in around the edges of his vision. 

He turned his head, trying to catch a glimpse of his assailant and gasped again. 'Thy fierce hand hath with the king's blood stained the king's own land...' he drew a ragged breath and gazed upward at the stone above him. 'Mount! Mount, my soul! Thy seat is up on high; whilst my gross flesh sinks downward here to die.'

His cousin stumbled backwards just as Richard had a moment earlier, tears in his eyes. 'As full of valour as of royal blood...' He let out a shaking sob and fled through the open door. The sound of the young man throwing himself against the cobblestones in the corridor echoed through the cavernous space.

That sound was followed by an odd mechanical scraping noise. Richard was drifting in and out of consciousness. As he peered up through his eyelashes from the dungeon floor, he thought he saw a strange blue box appear in his field of vision.

'No, no, no, no, no, NO.' The man that emerged from the box despaired, 'I'm too late.' He saw a flicker of movement beneath Richard's eyelids and swiftly knelt beside him. 'Breathest thou, gentle prince?'

'Quoi?' Richard asked hoarsely.

'Shhhhh... Don't talk. Translation circuit. It'll get sorted. We need to get you to the future.'

Richard figured he must be hallucinating from blood loss . Or dead. Possibly both. He felt himself being lifted from the floor. 

 

It felt wrong. How light he was. He was painfully thin, almost doll-like. The Doctor doubted he would be able to carry the man had he been in health. He must normally weigh the same as I do. The Doctor thought. Which wasn't much, but he wasn't particularly strong.  
He laid the former king on what appeared to be a twenty-first century hospital bed, helpfully provided by the TARDIS. The Doctor hurriedly sacrificed an old maroon t-shirt from somewhere in the closet in an attempt to staunch the bleeding.

'Focus.' the Doctor commanded, 'you need to keep from going into shock.' Richard's eyelids fluttered. 'I'm going to hypnotize you, okay?' He placed his his hands on either side of Richard's face. 

Of course memories seeped through. They always did. A childhood in the south of France. Sorrows that came not single spies. An adolescence lived, not exactly in fear, but in painful awareness of the superior aptitude of those that surrounded him. Years spent trying to piece together political theory. The realization that you cannot educate yourself into being a competent ruler. Love. Bright and true and mutual. A union of mind and spirit as much as the flush of blood, the gleam of an eye. Passion. Dependence. And then... Loss. Loss precluding utter despair. 

It was too much. Too human. To near his own experiences. He'd never tried telepathy as a human on someone completely human before*. He hadn't expected the emotional output to be so- So strong. 

He broke off the connection, but it was too soon. The medieval monarch's heart rate was too high.

'Qu'est-ce qui passe...' 

'Don't talk. Hold on... Your majesty.'

He felt Richard's pulse begin to stabilize. Oh, so that works, he thought. 

'I haven't got much of a stock of medical supplies, your highness- But I'm making do, the quickest solution would be nanogenes, so I'm aiming for the 51st century, but I obviously can't pilot at all really while I'm trying to keep pressure on the wound- I really should have let-' The Doctor wasn't sure whether Richard could hear or understand him, but he kept talking. 

 

*Rose wasn't completely human. Not since the Game Station, anyway


	3. The Wrong Branch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They accidentally end up in a hospital in New York

The Doctor felt his TARDIS come to a shuddering halt. He quickly checked the instruments, running around the hexagonal console as he was wont to do. 

'New York?' He wondered, 'What are we doing there?' He propped the TARDIS door open and took a look around. 'A mop closet?' He kicked the closet door open, 'In a hospital- Good. Good. Twenty-first century, though, if I'm not mistaken, might have done a bit better than that.' 

He wheeled the gurney out of the TARDIS, taking care not to knock over any of the mops that seemed to be rather precariously propped up in buckets around the small room. 

'ER? Emergency people? Someone?' He called loudly as he ran down the hall. 

A young woman with auburn hair was the first to come to his aid. 

'What's happened?' She asked in concern.

'It's my twin brother, he's been in a knife fight.'

She glanced at Richard on the gurney, clad in rags, his angular face tinged with a deathly greenish pallor, and the blood-soaked t-shirt that was crumpled beneath him. 

'Must have been one hell of a knife fight.'

'Must have been.' the Doctor agreed.

'Operating theater! Now!' the young woman commanded. 

Richard was vaguely aware of bright lights and faces in strange masks, and more or less entirely convinced at this point that he was hallucinating because this didn't match up with any afterlife he had ever heard of. Then the darkness around the edges of his vision swelled and consumed him.

'He's under anesthesia, now,' the surgeon informed the Doctor. 

He now saw that her name tag said 'Christine.'

'We need to get all this godforsaken hair out of the way.' She continued, working quickly. 

'Small intestine's damaged. So much for lactase persistence in the future.'

'He'll live?' the Doctor asked.

'He should.' Christine replied, her hands moving deftly. 'We need to get him hooked up to an IV... He's showing signs of dehydration.'

A few hours later Richard awoke in an uncomfortably bright room. There was a face hovering above him, a face that looked uncannily similar to his own.

He blinked up at him uncertainly.

'Am- am I alive?'

'Oh good. The translation circuit's working.'

'Translation circuit?'

'Translates languages so we can understand one another- I- frankly I can't even explain how it works to myself... So-'

'What language am I speaking?'

'English.'

Richard frowned in confusion.

'The English of several centuries after your time. We've travelled to the future.'

The deposed English king raised an eyebrow in an all-too-familiar way. 

'What's in my arm?' He asked, noticing tubing made out of metal and something clear and flexible.

'An IV.' 

'The Roman numeral four?'

'An intravenous drip, for delivering fluids. Slightly salinous water to maintain hydration. You were in Pomfret a long time.'

'Two weeks.' Richard happened to turn his head enough to see out the window across the New York skyline. 'How- how far in the future are we, exactly?'

'About six hundred years.'

Richard laid his head on the pillow again, tangled brown curls spreading rather poetically across the fabric. 'What happened to me?'

'I took you to a hospital to get you patched up...'

'But why? I mean, historically, what becomes of me? Why did you help me? Why do you look like me?'

'I- well, I- I'm facilitating a reversion to Boolean probability in terms of multiversial superstructure so that-'

'Quoi?' Richard demanded. 

'Fair enough. There's a version of the universe in which you're killed on February 14th, 1400 and one in which you're not. I'm making sure both versions exist.'

'So there's another me that's dead?'

'In a manner of speaking.'

'And who are you?'

'I'm the Doctor.'

'It would seem like it.'

Richard reached towards him with his arm that was free of the strange metal contraption. 

The Doctor took his hand.

'Stay with me.' Richard whispered. 'I don't belong here.'

'Oh, I wouldn't be too sure about that.' 

Richard's eyes gleamed amber under the industrial lighting, bright with perceptiveness.

'Are you human?' He asked.

'Just about,' the Doctor conceded, 'Just about.' 

Richard tugged the hospital blanket up to his chin with one hand, holding the arm with the IV stiff and still, afraid of moving it. He shuddered slightly as an insect-like buzzing sound filled the room. 

The Doctor slid a glass and metal rectangle out of a pouch in his clothing and looked at it. It seemed to be emitting some kind of light.

'What's that called?' Richard asked.

'A mobile phone.'

'No. The place- The part of your clothes where you kept it-'

'Pockets. A pocket.'

'Pockets. Ingenious.' 

'I think so too.'

'You just rest now. I need to go speak to the medical professionals.'

Richard took a slow deep breath. He still felt like he tasted blood at the back of his mouth. Part of his back and abdomen were numb, probably with some kind of drug, and he thought he felt stitches rub against the slightly coarse material of the hospital sheets. He would have some fairly extensive scars, he considered. He had been so sure he was going to die last night, six centuries earlier, but here he was.

The Doctor patted his hand, and stood up. 

Watching him leave, Richard felt rather overcome by another wave of disorientation and loneliness, sensations that had become familiar to him over the last several months of his life.

The Doctor walked into the Doctor's office, that is too say, the office of an actual medical Doctor. 

'Your brother seems to be in stable condition.' Christine informed him, 'But when he gets out of hospital, you might want to have him see a nutritionist and maybe a psychiatrist, I think that he-' 

The Doctor slid his psychic paper across the desk.

Christine regarded it skeptically, 'Well, if that is the case, I think you've rather neglected-'

'We've had our differences.' The Doctor responded curtly, 'But I'll look after him, don't worry.'

Christine was clearly continuing to worry. 

The Doctor couldn't come up with any reassuring way to explain that Richard's cousin had been keeping him in a dungeon, presumably in the hope that he would starve to death.

'Alright- Well, you take care of him, okay.'

The Doctor nodded, turned on his heel and inconspicuously proceeded down the corridor in the direction of the mop closet. As he passed the room where Richard lay, he heard a soft but commanding, 'No!'

He paused and reentered the hospital room.

'Don't leave me here.' There was an almost petulant plaintiveness in his voice, but the Doctor immediately regretted even considering leaving him more or less entirely helpless in a place that, as far as he was concerned, would have no contact with his own continent for ninety-two years.

'I- I need to-'

'Your box can travel through time, can it not?'

'Yes.'

'Then what are you worrying about?'

'I get anxious, the- the- time stream unravels and I can't feel it the way that I used to.'

'This is the wrong one isn't it?'

'The wrong what?'

'The version of history where I die. You went up the wrong side of the split.'

The Doctor stared at Richard. He lay between the plastic sheets in a hospital gown. Pale and weak, tendrils of hair plastered to his face with sweat. 

'You are full of surprises.'

'There's always an advantage in being surprising.'

'Possibly, but you need to rest. Heal. It'll take some time.'

'How do you know I'm supposed to live?'

'Because you need to.'

'For your own sake? Don't pretend that it's not your own interests you have at heart.'

The Doctor laughed humorlessly, 'I don't see how you ever got deposed.'

'Don't you?' Richard replied icily. 

The Doctor shivered. The young man in the hospital bed somehow managed to be commanding, almost frightening.   
'Like looking in a mirror, isn't it, Doctor?'

'We're- we're not- I don't-'

'Don't you?'

The Doctor knew he was right. He sighed and stared at the New York skyline spreading into the distance.

'When am I allowed to eat? I'm afraid if I lose consciousness, I might not wake up again.'

'I'll ask Christine.'


	4. Was This The Face?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> TenToo goes back to Pete's World

The Doctor eventually managed to sneak back to the TARDIS, but not without feeling Richard's cold imperious gaze as he skulked out of the room. He felt the small hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.   
There was something about that man.

A trans-dimensional hop, skip and jump away, he found himself once more in his English garden.   
He carefully opened the door and tried to close it quietly so that it didn't crash into the doorframe with a rather irritating clattering sound. He was unsuccessful. 

The older Doctor looked up from his cup of tea and Rose and Bill rose from their seats. Rosalind regarded him with that intense stare of hers.

'Back already?' Bill asked.

'Time machine.' He reminded her.

'What happened?' Rose inquired, peering up at her husband's worried face.

'Long story short, Richard of Bordeaux is in hospital... In New York... In a parallel universe... Being treated for a stab wound.'

'Sounds like a fine mess.' The Doctor summarized.

TenToo shook his head, 'And- For some reason he looks like me- Almost exactly like me.'

The Doctor seemed to be very fascinated with the lighting fixture on the ceiling.

'And so- I figured that if... This face is an echo of that of someone who caused a split in the time stream...'

'Incandescent or fluorescent?' The Doctor interrupted.

'I'm sorry?'

'The light, is it an incandescent or fluorescent bulb?'

'Does it matter?' TenToo demanded, his voice inadvertently taking on a decidedly un-English sibilance.

'They're LEDs.' Rose provided helpfully.

'Are they?'

'That's good.'

'So... I've been thinking about your face.'

'Uh huh.'

'I know that face.'

'Caecilius of Pompeii.'

'That must mean-'

'That there was a split in time. There was. A version of the universe in which Earth was destroyed.'

'Oh.'

'There's nothing you can do to save Pompeii. You were there. You know this.'

'I just thought that maybe...'

'You can't.'

'You tried, didn't you?'

The Doctor nodded.

TenToo took Rose's hand and more or less collapsed against her.

'What morality is this? Creating parallel worlds? How do I know what's supposed to- I- I can't even feel it anymore...'

'It's okay to be human.' Rose whispered in his ear. 'It's okay.'

'I don't want... I can.... I don't.'

The Doctor turned to Bill, 'Let's, ah... Maybe go outside?' 

Bill shook her head, 'He's you. You're responsible for him. You'd react exactly the same way to being confronted with all the ways you're not a Time Lord anymore. Because you are. And there's no shame in it.'

'But... It's been seven years.'

'Yes, but you're here now.' 

Rose was still holding TenToo close and whispering to him. 

'I think on some level he wants you to be more competent than him, but if...' Bill bit her lip, if you're not was what she was going to say.

'Richard's not going to get into trouble in New York, is he?' Rosalind interrupted.

'Last I saw of him he wasn't really even able to move.' TenToo responded tearfully. 

'Please don't cry.' The young child squirmed about awkwardly. There are few things more uncomfortable for children than watching their parents weep. 

'I need to go-' TenToo fled the house, the door clattering shut behind him.   
Rose turned toward the Doctor accusingly.

'What?' He shrugged, 'he's your husband.'


	5. The Third Millennium

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> TenToo returns to find out what has become of Richard

The Doctor appeared a couple weeks later in a parallel world, just as Richard was being discharged from the hospital. 

'Oh, Richard, I-' he said as he almost ran into him. The incremental movement of the Plantagenet's left eyebrow communicated all that needed to be said. 'I'm sorry.'

'You are a terrible brother!' Christine announced from somewhere down the corridor.

'Yeah, John, how could you be so terrible?' Richard echoed helpfully.

'What has he been telling you?'

'About how you grew up in London, and then you got a scholarship for university and got this six-figure paying job, you were a lawyer, or a-'

'A doctor.'

'But some really specific discipline, and you cut off your family, and then they moved, and Richard was an art student for a while, and when your mother died, he ended up living on the streets, and-'

The Doctor must have been making strange expressions, because Richard was gesturing to him just beyond Christine's field of vision. 

'Excuse me, may I speak to my brother alone?' The Doctor asked.

Christine shook her head, 'He's been woefully mistreated, and frankly I don't trust-'

The Doctor decided he may as well play along, 'For God's sake! How many times have I saved you life?' he blustered, affecting a more posh accent than his own.

'Once.' Richard replied truthfully, 'Two weeks ago.' 

The Doctor was artfully taking steps backward in the direction of the mop closet as this conversation progressed.  
Just as they were about to pass the doorway from which the Doctor had emerged, Richard turned to Christine and said 'It's okay, really, I probably should talk to him.'

'No- I-' Christine protested, but the pair of them had disappeared into the closet.

She stood in the hall for several seconds, staring blankly ahead, trying to figure out where they had gone.

'I've extended the perception filter,' the Doctor whispered, 'she won't realize we're in here.'

'Qu'est-ce que c'est?' 

'Fair enough, fair enough. It's the TARDIS cloaking device.'

Richard nodded as though this made perfect sense.

'You've been... Unexpectedly adaptable.'

Richard stretched his arms above his head languorously. His hair was pulled back in a bushy ponytail and the Doctor wondered if Christine had stolen the t-shirt and jeans he was wearing from a colleague. 'Peut-être. But did you not expect it? The fourteenth century is hardly the Middle Ages, after all.'

The Doctor shrugged, wondering where Richard had acquired his definitions of what was and was not the Middle Ages, 'Still, that amount of acting and assimilating, it's unusual, I was under the impression that you were rather more-'

'Set in my ways? Perhaps.' A strand of hair had escaped from his ponytail and he distractedly wound it around his elegant fingers until it formed a corkscrew ringlet. 'I've lived one way all my life. But I've spent two weeks in a dungeon and two weeks in the future... And-' he smirked, 'let me tell you, lying is far easier than changing.'

The Doctor shivered again, he knew exactly what he meant.

Richard paused thoughtfully, taking in the plastic bottles of cleaning fluid and other paraphernalia of industrial cleanliness.   
'Did you ever go on the Internet?' 

'Oh, Richard,' the Doctor sighed, 'what did you do?'

'Nothing. But it's frightening. It's like a room full of incense and everyone is worshipping different gods. The smoke clouds your vision and makes you feel sick and you wonder about the composition of the human soul.'

The Doctor was silent for several seconds. Richard's was an accurate summation, but he was still irrevocably enamored of the vibrancy of human civilization. Because he had to be, didn't he? For the past seven years it was all he had. Humans. The rest of Earth's species had been mute to him. His Earth-born TARDIS was deaf to their cries. 

'Does anything impress you? The computational feats, the speed of communication, free access to information? The sharing of art and culture?' 

Richard shrugged. 'There's so much of it. The experience of it feels kind of... Uncommitted.'

'What about all the people that-'

'What of them?'

'Anyhow, uhhh...' the Doctor turned around, gesturing toward the TARDIS, 'We had better leave. Get you to London.'

'Where my ancestor's descendants sit upon the throne. What power have they? Is it not to me that they owe this symbolism.' Richard shook his head, almost like a horse shaking flies from its mane. His ponytail was tossed forward over his shoulder. 

'Uhhh... Probably.' The Doctor ceremoniously turned the key in the TARDIS door and stepped inside.   
Richard followed him. 

'Is this common, in the future? That the interior of a structure is-'

'Larger than the exterior? Nope.' The Doctor replied, almost skipping around the hexagonal structure in the center of the room. 'I think you'll find-' he manipulated some metal devices protruding from the mushroom-like panel, 'that at this point in time, this is the only one in existence.' He pulled a lever attached to some kind of gear. 'In the future or the past, however, I can't honestly say-' he hit something with a hammer, 'One way or the other.'

There were exposed ribs of something non-mechanical lining the room.

'This thing wouldn't happen to be alive, would it?'

'Yes, yes, she is.' The Doctor grinned.

'And it can travel through time?'

'And space, obviously.'

'How... Oh. You're not going to explain it, are you?' Richard realized, somewhat irritated by this.

The Doctor shook his head. 'Higher dimensional physics is... I don't even know when humans invented words to explain it, but somehow they never go over very well.' 

The centre console was making a strange noise and the Doctor ran around again with the hammer. When he had completed his circuit, he looked towards the double doors expectantly.

They obligingly open to reveal a broad vista of London spread out below them. 

'Welcome home, Richard Plantagenet the Second.'

'Where are we?' Richard asked, peering outside.

'Roof of Westminster Abbey.' 

He saw that was true. The odd blue box was perched precariously at the edge of the roof.

'But- My bones are down there, aren't they?'

Doctor's little finger was tucked into the corner of his mouth, pressed against his teeth and Richard couldn't tell if it was one of the time traveller's many nervous ticks or if he was trying to taste some kind of precipitory residue from the air. 

'Didn't think of that. But they're not your bones, they're the bones of someone who died on the floor of Pomfret Castle on February 14th, 1400.' 

'Still me. The only person I ever was. The King of England.'

'Perhaps.'

'So, that's-'

'Westminster Palace.'

'They've added stuff... There's towers. That's new- It's-' He stared, wide-eyed at his former home, as though trying to absorb everything that had occurred in the intervening centuries. 'Everything I was responsible for- It looks like from the outside that it survived... Did- Is the ceiling still-'

'Yes.'

'Take me somewhere else.' Richard commanded. 

' 'Course. Sorry.'


	6. This England

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> TenToo tries to leave again

The TARDIS materialized at a London street corner. The Doctor, frankly, didn't know exactly what to do with Richard, but he knew he had to heal more before he sent him back to his proper century.

There was supposed to be a universe where he wasn't murdered in the first place. What had gone wrong? That wasn't Edward of Rutland back there, was it? That wouldn't make sense. And the history books said he starved to death. 

He watched the former king attempt to open the TARDIS doors, his t-shirt hung loosely from his shoulders. Stealing clothes from a hospital. He knew something about that.

'You do know how to open doors, don't you?'

The glare he received was withering and well below freezing. 

'They open inward. Even though the sign on the door says 'pull to open.''

'You know what. You can stop talking.'

'Did you just-' Richard began, with what must have been a familiar half-serious indignation. He stared at his hands. The neat, clean fingernails. He remembered a time when they had been caked with dirt and blood, and a time long before that when they had been illuminated with gold leaf. Like a page in a book. Was that what he was now? A footnote in the history of England?  
He pulled the doors open onto a small side street.

'It's very grey, isn't it?' He observed, taking in the row of stone houses, 'In my day it was more... Sort of brown.'

'Yeah, wood.' The Doctor tilted his head, leaning against the TARDIS, 'There was a fire.'

'Did you start it?'

'Can you not?' 

'What else have you done to this town?'

'Can you just-'

'How old are you, Doctor?'

'Nine-hundred and thirteen.' 

'When were you born?'

'Far away.'

'That's not a time.'

'Yes it is.'

'Where are we going?'

'I've taken the liberty of renting you a flat... And ah,' he handed him a briefcase that seemed to have materialized from nowhere, 'a few thousand pounds, don't spend it all in one spot.'

'A few thousand?' 

'Inflation. Six hundred years of it.'

'But I- I don't even know how much stuff is supposed to cost in my own time.'

'Hmm... Well, no harm done, I suppose... Just this way- And then there's something I need to go check out a few hundred years earlier-'

'Can I come with you?'

'I'm sorry?'

'To the past- Or the future or whatever.'

'You can't. You're not supposed to even-'

'You're already using me. I'm a means to an end.'

'You'd be a frozen corpse in Gascogne Tower.' 

Richard turned away from him, with something akin to the growl of an injured animal, 'Maybe you're not human after all.'  
Then, with a surprising display of agility, for he was still recovering from the ordeal of February fourteen-hundred, he reversed direction and overtook the Doctor at a flat sprint, shoving the TARDIS door closed behind him.

His vision swam with dark spots and he tasted blood. His breath was ragged. A sharp pain swelled from somewhere inside of him and he collapsed against the wooden interior of the double doors.

He heard the click of a key in the lock, but he somehow lacked both energy and motivation to move out of the way of the inward-opening door. The Doctor pushed the door slowly, but Richard still fell forward, what seemed to him to be in slow motion, his skin scraping against the metal grating of the TARDIS floor. 

The Doctor slipped through the opening in the doorway. 

'Oh, Richard.' He whispered in dismay.

Richard blinked up at him resentfully.

He knelt beside him, 'I'm so sorry.'

'Don't touch me.' he sneered, or possibly it was a grimace of pain.

'I shouldn't have-'

'What's done is done.' 

'Are you okay?'

Richard coughed pathetically, which hurt more than he expected. He felt his eyes watering.

'Let me help you.'

'You-' Richard swallowed, squeezing his eyes shut. Instead of finishing the sentence, he curled into a ball on the floor.   
A few moments later he felt something soft descend over him. A blanket made out of some strange sort of fiber. 

'Please. Do you have to be on the floor? It's metal. The grating has edges that- Please.' 

Richard surrendered once more to unconsciousness.


	7. Ages Hence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I COMPLETELY FORGOT ALEXANDER HAMILTON WAS IN THIS

He awoke to a piece of straw poking him in the face. The bed, though coarse, smelled of sunlight and harvests. He thought that perhaps he had fallen asleep in the stables. That happened sometimes. When he was younger he used to do it on purpose, and imagine he was something he wasn't. A stable boy, an urchin wandering the countryside, or perhaps a prince on the banks of the Garonne with three people between him and the throne. 

Sometimes he just needed a break from the darkness and vastness, the goose feathers and the velvet canopy that blocked out the starlight 

They used to carry him inside whenever this happened, until one day he commanded them to stop. So sometimes he would wake up with the damp chill of the morning soaking into his riding clothes, and walk back through the low-lying fog that clung to the earth.  
But now there was no dank odor of manure or the smell of horses. A smell which somehow always reminded of winter days spent on the hunt, when the cold burned his nose with each breath and the only odor he was conscious of was the sweat of the animal he clung to, riding through the snow at a brisk trot in an attempt to keep warm with the animal's body heat, breaking into a gallop when the hounds caught the scent of game. 

He opened his eyes to a stream of dust motes dancing in a ray of sunlight and immediately wondered what century he was in. The room was wood, with some sort of cross-beam structure across the ceiling. He remembered what the Doctor had said about fires. Where was the Doctor?

He heard a voice from somewhere else in the building, for it was quite loud and excitable, 'I was chosen for the constitutional convention!'

He rubbed his eyes groggily. A constitutional convention? What did that mean? He surveyed the scratches on the bare skin of his arms. They were superficial. A year or two ago would have complained about them incessantly. 

He stood up cautiously, noticing that he was barefoot again. He wondered what had happened to the shoes Christine has stolen for him. 

He opened to door to the small bedroom and called out into the hall, 'Doctor?'

He nearly ran into a young man, considerably shorter than himself, with hair pulled back into plait wrapped in black ribbons. He clutched a letter to his chest and his startling eyes gleamed ecstatically. 

Richard found himself staring at him. He felt as though he were a lute or a dulcimer and this little man, his face flushed with excitement was plucking at the strings just by looking at him. Those eyes. 

'I was chosen for the constitutional convention.' He repeated, bouncing up and down on his toes. 

'Who are you?' Richard asked.

'Alexander Hamilton, former lieutenant to General Washington. You're in my house. Who are you?'

'King Richard Plantagenet the Second?' He wondered, squinting one eye, trying to gage whether he was supposed to be telling him this.

'Is that what they wear in the Middle Ages these days?'

'Renaissance.' Richard corrected.

'What?'

'Fourteenth century is renaissance... And, uh... No it's not... Actually.' 

'Hmmm.'

'Do you know the Doctor?'

'Oh, him. Yes. Are you related?'

'No.'

'He's an odd one. I worry about him sometimes.' 

'Is he dangerous?'

Alexander tilted his chin in a way Richard could only interpret as coquettish.

'Are you?' 

Richard raised an eyebrow. 

'Oi! Leave him alone.'

Richard and Alexander turned around simultaneously.

'To whom are you speaking?' Alex asked.

'I thought he might be interrogating you.'

Richard and Alex looked at one another. 

'About what?' Richard wondered.

Alexander noticed the scratches on Richard's arms. 'Attacked by a cheese grater?'

'Something like that.' Richard agreed. 

'Do you want something for that?'

'Come to the kitchen. We might have a thing.'

Richard and the Doctor followed Alexander downstairs to a small well-kept kitchen. 

'What have you done with Eliza and the children?' The Doctor asked.

'They're asleep. It's five in the morning.'

'Is it?' 

As though in response, Alex brought down a bottle of whisky from one of the cabinets.

'That's from Scotland.' The Doctor observed.

'Yup. Once in a blue moon my family actually decides to write to me.'

He poured a small amount into a glass and poured it over the scratches on Richard's arms, then refilled the glass and handed it to him. 

'Which of you was the Doctor again?' Richard asked, taking a sip. 'This is good. Your family has good taste.'

Alex shrugged, 'Or money, more like. The lairdship of Grange. Aristocracy.'

'They're not mutually exclusive.'

'Of course not.'

'Did you have to give him alcohol?' The Doctor asked. 

Richard and Alex still didn't know who he was referring to, because Alex had given himself a glass as well. 

'Who is General Washington?' Richard asked, eventually.

'He's going to be president.' The Doctor informed him.

Alex rolled his eyes. 'Everyone knows that.'

'We should probably go before Eliza wakes up.'

'But we just got here-'

'You were asleep for five hours.'

'Why do you keep- What are you trying to do to me?'

'I'm trying to save your life.'

'You're trying to create a split in the time stream.'

The Doctor shook his head, 'Don't you understand? You have a future now.'

'Do I? As a fugitive? On the run? Alone? What kind of a future is that?'

The Doctor leaned forward, chin in his hands, elbows on the table, 'Not a future that would tear apart time and space and create another world.' 

Alex's shining eyes went back and forth from Richard to the Doctor as though watching a tennis match.

'Wait- Are you saying that-'

The Doctor smiled.

'What are you saying?'

The Doctor shook his head.

'What are you saying?'

The Doctor stood up. 

'Don't make me run again.'

The Doctor bounced impatiently from foot to foot.

'Are you capable of walking like a normal person?' 

'"Normal person"? What's that?'

Richard drained the rest of the glass and stood up. 

'Where's your box?'

'Outside. Come along.'

'Adieu, Alexander. Constitutional monarchy, remember. C'est une chose.'

'Ciao, Alex.'

Richard and the Doctor made their way outside to the actual stables where the TARDIS was parked, Richard holding onto the Doctor's arm, trying to look ill and waif-like and not quite succeeding due to a delicate pink alcohol-induced flush to his pale cheeks. 

'Why were you here?'

'I thought if the time stream was in flux-'

'What happens to him.'

'He gets killed in a duel... I thought that maybe...'

'How can you tell?'

'I think the TARDIS would let me know if-'

'You don't know, do you? You don't know. You're pretending you do, but you really can't tell. Why?'

'I know your world exists. The one you're going to create. I have a wife and a child there. I can't risk changing anything else.' 

'You're going to dump me in London again.' Richard observed.

'This has all been one afternoon for me. There are people waiting.'

Richard stared at him for a few seconds. 'Time. Machine.' 

The Doctor sighed. 'What do you want me to do? You've got a pile of cash and an Oyster card. I spend, like, eighty percent of my time in 21st century London anyway.'

'Why?' 

The Doctor noticed that Richard was holding a slightly crumpled piece of paper. 'You made a list.' He observed.  
Richard nodded.

'People don't usually do that.'

Richard sniffed, not unlike a child that had been refused an expensive toy. 

The Doctor handed him the briefcase of cash again, and the key to the flat.

He paused for a moment, and then reached into his pocket and handed Richard a flip phone from the mid-2000s.  
'Maybe later. Provided I don't retcon you.' 

'Retcon?' Richard asked, after the Doctor had already basically shoved him out the door. 

'Bye!' The Doctor waved, wiggling his fingers peculiarly.

Then the doors slammed shut and the TARDIS dematerialized. 

Richard looked up and down the street, at passersby and the cold grey stone, damp with the rain of a morning he hadn't lived through.


	8. Mind The Gap

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Completely gratuitous David Tennant cameo

A few days later a Scottish actor stepped onto a circle line train. He was somehow managing to wear headphones and a hat at the same time. With one hand he held the rail near the door, with the other he flicked through the iTunes playlist on his phone. 

He glanced up, and for a moment he thought he saw a familiar face at the end of the train car. He looked back at his phone, but felt someone staring at him. That was normal, but he looked up anyway. It was like a reflection. The man at the far end of the train car looked uncannily similar to him.

They say there are seven people on Earth that look like you, he thought.

Except this man had long wavy hair streaming over the shoulders of his pale cream-coloured wool coat. 

He looked away self-consciously. When he looked up again the man was gone. 

Could he have imagined it? He couldn't shake the image of dark curls against pale fabric. 

He visually surveyed the occupants of the car, wary of drawing attention to himself.

There was nothing out of the ordinary.

He opened the notes app on his phone and began to type: Hair. Propose idea to rsc costume dept.


	9. Encore Une Fois

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Richard II is considerably more freaked out by David Tennant than David Tennant was by Richard II

Richard had left the train at the first available stop. He wasn't sure why he found himself walking so quickly up to the surface, or why he was shaking with nervous energy. Far stranger things had occurred in the past several weeks than seeing someone who looked like him on the underground. But somehow he knew now that this universe wasn't what the Doctor thought it was. Could time have split three ways from that night under Pomfret castle? 

He stood outside the train station, breathing the cool air, beads of water condensing on the fibers of his wool coat. 

He reached into his pocket and flipped open the small mobile phone the Doctor had given him. He repeatedly depressed the small arrow buttons of the keypad, clicking through the alphabetized list of programmed contacts, then selected the green button on the right of the little box. 

The Doctor answered on the fourth ring. Probably had to run around the console a few times before he could be bothered to answer the phone, Richard thought.

'Yes?' The Doctor asked dramatically.

'It's Richard.'

'You can't open a bank account. I'm sorry. I don't know what you're trying to do, but-'

'It's not that.'

'What then?'

'There's another one.' 

'What?'

Richard dropped his voice to a whisper, playing along with the Doctor's theatrics, 'Another person that looks like us.'

The Doctor was silent for several seconds. 'I need to take you back.'

'What?'

'Back to Pomfret. Time is fraying.'

'Aren't there supposed to be people preventing that?' 

The Doctor grunted. 

'That's what I thought... Where should I-'

The still air began to move, swirling in a concentric circle, carrying dead grey leaves from the ground. 

'Oh.' Richard said, still speaking into the phone, 'should have guessed.'

He slipped the flip phone into his pocket as the TARDIS materialized around him.

'Yes!' The Doctor crowed. 'First time I've managed that with this girl.'

'What- You know what, never mind.' Richard walked across the room perched on the console room chair like an auburn-and-ivory-coloured bird of paradise.

'We can't let Aumerle-'

Richard closed his eyes and wrapped his arms around his knees.

'I'm trying to fine-tune the landing procedures, but before that you need to go change... First left, second right, third left, under the stair past the bins, fifth door on the left, I've done my best to keep the desktop consistent so that-'

Richard opened his eyes to glower at him blankly. 

'Okay. Okay.' The Doctor conceded, gesturing for Richard to climb down from the chair. 'And you can keep the shoes.' 

Richard looked at his shoes. They were white and slipper-like with slightly pointy toes. He shrugged.

The Doctor led him through a series of twisting corridors to a large room with a spiral staircase running down the middle of it.  
Richard smiled almost against his will. It was definitely a wardrobe he could agree with in scale and variety, if not taste.

The Doctor pointed him towards a plain white gown. 

Richard blanched. 'What I was wearing.'

The Doctor nodded.

'I'll look like a ghost.'

'You're going to destroy the British monarchy.'

'What?'

'And don't eat milk products.'

'What?'

'Live your life. It's all you can do.'


	10. Denouement

Edward, former Duke of Aumerle, eventually picked himself up off of the flagstones in the corridor leading towards the tower. 

He didn't think he could bring himself to look at what was left of his cousin. His beautiful cousin. The numb cold feeling in his chest was constricting. Aching. He couldn't process the fact that he had been the one to deal the blow that deprived Richard of his life. 

They were starving him, he told himself, and probably he had already been poisoned. This was faster. 

What he was afraid of, in this cold, detached state of mind, was that he hadn't made a clean job of it. That Richard was slowly and agonizingly bleeding to death at the end of the hall.

He couldn't look at his hands but they felt sticky, coated in a viscous film he knew to be his cousin's blood. Blood that should be inside him. Keeping him alive. 

Somehow he found himself walking in the direction of the tower. He tried to stop and nearly tripped. The sound he had heard earlier echoed through the chamber again. 

He passed under the stone archway again, and gasped. 

In the center of the circular space, illuminated in an unearthly blue light, standing at the edge of a pool of his own blood, was Richard.  
At first he thought he was seeing an angel or some manner of incorporeal spirit. Richard's rags were reverted to a clean white gown, his hair, tangled and matted with dirt a few minutes earlier was now clean and shining. His face was no longer painfully gaunt or smudged with dust.

As he saw Aumerle step into the blue light cast by the TARDIS, he took a step backward in agitation, then stood still. Waiting.  
Angels, to Edward's knowledge, didn't stumble like that. He let out a cry of raw emotion and ran towards him. Richard caught him in his arms. 

'You almost killed me back there.' He whispered.

'What miracle is this? What angels? The English crown is truly sacrosanct! And thou the truest king to-' Richard kissed him instinctively and at once he was warm and alive and everything Edward thought he never would be again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a bit quick for a resolution, but at this point they're running on emotion, not thoughts. I imagine they will eventually sort through the "why did you try to murder me" details


End file.
